Grow your business using better financial intelligence | Corelytics financial dashboard

A question we are asked everyday is “what is CoreConnex seeing work well for other IT service companies?” While we do not share trade secrets, we can tell you that similar to the list of behaviors mentioned in Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Successful People that sold over 15 million copies, there are 10 habits that the most profitable IT service companies practice. These practices work whether you are a single-shingle or 25-engineer company.

1. Add a business management component to the services you offer and messages you are communicating to your clients and prospects.
2. Create greater visibility on the work you do for your client. It is important to remind clients how your services help them achieve their business goals. 
3. Get client managers more involved in managing their IT results and performance; establish a sense of partnership, create tighter working relationships, focus on collaboration and joint planning, monitoring and priority setting.
4. 20% of your clients take up 80% of your time – implement service level agreements and set client expectations on response time accordingly. Rushing to save the client that has not bought into your higher service levels can be a profit drain and often is not what the client was expecting.
5. Create a mechanism to accept feedback on work performed and hold staff to a high quality standard based on client perceptions of service. The client’s perception is the only one that counts.
6. Measure and monitor the results of your staff and the financial performance of your company continuously. Having clear goals and a picture of company financial trends is crucial to making sure you do not provide service, employ staff or implement processes that lose money or drag down overall performance.
7. Manage to a balanced portfolio of clients, investments and risk/reward. An unbalanced portfolio can break a company when market conditions change.
8. Implement staff incentive programs based on at least three performance metrics including a) utilization b) qualify of service c) manager performance review. All require that measurement processes be put in place.
9. Require staff to become part of the sales and marketing process, even if it is just learning to identify potential sales or up-sell opportunities and then handing off to the account manager to make the sale.
10. Build the company with the intent of creating a valuable asset for its owners. The use of a financial dashboard helps track your progress. This will generate significant barganing power for the principals and share holders in the event of a sale, acquisition, obtaining a bank loan or negotiating a buy-in from employees.

Each IT service company approaches these management habits with their own variation, but top performers have developed disciplines in each area. I once read a comment after a blog on Ziff Davis’ IT Link that anyone interested in making money should not get into the IT service business – that company obviously had not implemented any of these management habits… and of course, had the wrong attitude. 

Building a successful company is not an easy process. But knowing where to focus and being sure that you are hitting all the bases is critical. These 10 business disciplines can be a great checklist for evaluating where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

I will be drilling into to each of these topics in the future and exploring more about how they can be tackled or optimized in a business that wants to grow and evolve. Stay tuned…